Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast

115:22

A Lake and Shed Conversation about the Lost Mother...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/10/05

This is the third of three posts about the Lost Mother Golden Thread in the work of J. K. Rowling. The first, Anne Rowling and the Lost Mother Golden Thread in the Works of J. K. Rowling, reviewed Rowling-Galbraith’s regrets at the death of her mother Anne in December 1990 with a listing with brief discussion of the many Lost Mothers in her twenty-three published books. In the second, The Lost Mother Golden Thread and a Key Reason We are Moved by J. K. Rowling’s Stories, John joined the Lost Mother

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111:30

The Lake, Shed, and Golden Thread Aspects of Rowling...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/09/24

This video podcast is the third in a series of three posts about the Hidden Hold of Horrors Golden Thread in the work of author Rowling-Galbraith. A Golden Thread is a plot point, scene, or character type that recurs repeatedly through an author’s stories, a commonality that is evident only when looking at the writer’s writings viewed as a whole. The ‘Hidden Hold of Horrors’ repeated scene is of a location underground, be it a cave, a cellar, a tunnel, a tomb, or a basement pool, in which a

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109:08

Year One of ‘The Hallmarked Man’ at Hogwarts...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/09/19

Nick Jeffery and John Granger met on Wednesday this week to talk about John’s epic ‘Index to the First Year of Reading Hallmarked Man’ that was posted a week ago. Both were delighted (and a little surprised?) by the range and depths of the work done here and elsewhere to unpack the eighth Strellacott mystery, easily the most carefully planned and unique of the Strike series.Below are the ten questions Nick and John asked one another, brief versions of their answers, and links to points they made for

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110:36

HBO+ Harry Potter Roll-Out is Heavy with Traditional...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/09/10

Nick and John get together to discuss three HogwartsProfessor posts about the All New Hogwarts House Emblems and Rowling’s commentary via three emojis about the recent trailer for the Bronte Studios adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. You can read those posts via these links:The HBO+ Potter Trailer: The Meaning of Rowling’s Heart, Owl, and Lightning BoltHBO’s Harry Potter and the Alchemical SymbolsThe New Hogwarts House Emblems and Their Alchemical and Plant SymbolismOr you can

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104:31

A Conversation about the Symbolism of the Letter 'G'...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/08/26

Nick Jeffery and freshly Shorn & Clean Shaven John Granger sit down to discuss John’s two posts about the symbolism of the Letter ‘G’ in Strike 8. Part One of the series did the necessary work of demonstrating that, yes, the letter ‘G’ is all over Hallmarked Man, from the online guess that the murderer carved that initial into ‘William Wright’s back to the Witness G echoing with Green-jacked Gorilla-bearing man and a bit of calligraphic terrorism on the Agency door at street-level. The first also

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97:44

Shanker's 'Old Man,' Leda Strike's Tattoo, Her First...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/07/29

Late last month, John shared two theories about the Cormoran Strike series of novels, both from Katya Slonenko, a member of the Reddit r/CormoranStrike online fandom: Dementia, Jewelry, and a Nine Inch Cock: The Mystery of Shanker’s ‘Old Man,’ His Given Name, and Why He’s Never Killed Jeff Whittaker and Katya Slonenko: Leda Strike's 'Mistress of the Salmon Salts' Pudenda Tattoo. John corresponded with Katya while preparing those posts and invited her to join him and Nick for a discussion of her

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102:44

A Pen to Change the World: Conversation with Solomon...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/07/19

(Credit: Telegraph article, June 2017, J.K. Rowling at the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation party in 2007, wearing a floral diamond necklace and matching earrings, cf., Christmas Pig)Solomon Schmidt, author of A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J. K. Rowling (Skyhorse, June 2026), sat down with us again to discuss what challenges he faced in collating and synthesizing almost thirty years of interviews for his biography. He also shares the three questions he’d ask The Presence if she’d consent to an

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107:41

A Pen to Change the World: Conversation with Solomon...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/07/09

(Credit: Neil Wilder, Edinburgh 1999, now in National Portrait Galley)Solomon Schmidt, author of A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J. K. Rowling (Skyhorse, June 2026), sat down with us this week to discuss what moved him to write a Rowling biography at the height of her radioactivity as a supposed “transphobe” and the obstacles that Rowling, Inc., puts in the way of unauthorized biographers. He also shares the kindness and circumspection of the people who did agree to speak with him, to include

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60:55

The Mysterious Suicides of Leda Strike and Charlotte...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/06/19

‘Fiona F’ is a Hogwarts Professor subscriber in Adelaide, Australia, the truly down under capitol of the South Pacific island-continent. She works as an environmental scientist on the days she isn’t combing through the Cormoran Strike novels of Rowling-Galbraith in search of answers to the over-arching mysteries of that series.The Hogwarts Professor Talking Heads duo invited her to a discussion of her potential solutions to two of the unresolved questions that have to be answered before the epilogue

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80:39

The First Seven Strike Novels Paralleled Their Seven...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/06/05

Last week Ed Shardlow posted his thoughts about The Hallmarked Man being written in playful but meaningful parallel with Rowling’s “political fairy tale,” ‘The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog.’ Nick Jeffery and John Granger called him up both to congratulate him on Arsenal winning the Premier League Cup — Go, Gunners! — and to learn as much as they could about the parallels he noted. After acknowledging the correspondences with Casual Vacancy, the trio explored Ed’s argument about the Ickabog

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53:31

The Hidden Narratives and Interpretive Ciphers...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/05/22

In yesterday’s Hallmarked Man Notes: The Christmas Charm Bracelet Decoded, Tod Jameson and the Ectopic Pregnancy, and Venetian Blinds, Ed Shardlow explained three sub-texts within Strike 8 that, though invisible on first and second reading, pop up during structural analysis and in light of other Rowling-Galbraith notes.* The Christmas gift charm bracelet that Strike gives to Robin, for example, appears to be a ring and a key to Hallmarked Man, a meaning that occurred to Ed in light of Rowling’s own

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81:14

A Conversation about Cormoran Strike, Literary...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/05/14

Nick Jeffery and John Granger sat down last weekend to discuss John’s post, The Literary Alchemy of Hallmarked Man: What Do the Structural Models Tell Us? They’d talked about this subject briefly before John had written it up and he came to rather different conclusions in the process of writing and preparing slides for the post, all of which are rolled out in this inquisition.The questions Nick asked are below after the links in the post in case you want to follow up on what is said above about

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116:12

Wet Squibs, Islamic Cub Names, the Seven Strike...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/05/12

Nick Jeffery and John Granger sat down to discuss four Hogwarts Professor posts. Here are links to those posts with an excerpt from each and the most relevant urls embedded in them. Enjoy!What is a Squib, Really? And Where Would Rowling Have Met the Word? (John Granger, 27 April 2026)I confess that I assumed the word for barely magical witches and wizards born into magical families in J. K. Rowling’s Wizarding World, the folk she calls ‘Squibs,’ were given that name because of its onomatopoeic

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101:44

Is Rowling's Incest 'Golden Thread' the Key to Her...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/04/29

Golden ThreadsLast July, Nick Jeffery and I put together a month long review of Rowling’s work in celebration of her 60th birthday, a Kanreki party. Every day we posted conversations about each of Rowling’s works with Nick discussing a ‘Lake’ point, something biographical or bibliographical, and me talking about a ‘Shed’ quality of the work, the author’s traditional tools, artistry, and meaning.That worked great for about twenty days. Then we ran out of books. What to do for the remaining days of

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107:02

A Spirited Conversation about Rowling-Galbraith's...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/04/19

[Apologies but the recording is quite poor at the start, but improves. Please bear with it - Nick]John Granger shared privately with Nick Jeffery that he thought it would be a good idea to read C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, a re-telling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, to get a better grip on Rowling-Galbraith’s re-imagining of the same myth in her Cormoran Strike series.Nick, as is his wont, promptly read the book, wrote up the possible connections between the chapters of Till We Have Faces and the

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104:23

Metallurgical, Literary, and Psychological Alchemy:...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/04/02

This is the second of a series of posts about the literary alchemy of J. K. Rowling, a discussion jumpstarted by a post by ‘Iris’ at a Strike fan website, an article that championed a Jungian perspective on this subject. The first post in this series, Literary Alchemy – A Primer for Those Interested in J. K. Rowling’s Artistry, both explained what the ‘Iris’ post asserted and reviewed much of the critical literature that the brevity of the S&E Files article prevented her from discussing. See that

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87:22

What do Tyler Powell, Rupert Fleetwood, Jolanda...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/03/02

Nick Jeffery and John Granger met up last Sunday — St David’s Day in Wales and the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy — to talk about John’s first Hallmarked Man names post, ‘The Allegorical Cryptonyms of The Hallmarked Man, Part One: Ten Cratylic Character Names and their Embedded Meanings.’ In addition to reviewing the high points of that post, Nick offered his insights about the first names John tried to decipher and John added context to the ‘Name Game’ Rowling Readers globally have been playing

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97:17

What the Hallmarked Man Epigraphs Reveal About...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/02/22

Nick Jeffery read Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a Victorian epic poem about a murder mystery in 17th Century Italy, to test a theory. John Granger’s best guess after surveying the chapter headings of Hallmarked Man last September was that, of all 77 sources for the 139 epigraphs in Strike8, Browning’s poem was the most likely to hold a secret message or special meaning inside it. John had said something similar about another Browning poem and Ink Black Heart, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s

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82:49

'Sleep Tight, Evangeline,' Miniature Psalters, and...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/02/17

Last November Nick and John introduced Dimitra Fimi, the magnificent maven of Tolkien Studies and Professor of Fantasy and Children's Literature at the University of Glasgow, to students of J. K. Rowling’s work. In that discussion, ‘Reading Rowling as Myth Maker and Myth Re-Writer: A Conversation with Dr Dimitra Fimi,’ she shared her thoughts about Rowling’s creative use of mythology in Harry Potter but especially in the Cormoran Strike series.The Hogwarts Professor team asked her to join us again

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118:20

Valentine's Day Special: The Cupid and Psyche Myth...

Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast ·

2026/02/14

Happy Valentine’s Day!Mrs Murray met the UK StrikeFans.com contingent and Badly WiredLamp (“and friends”) on Thursday to talk about the Cormoran Strike novels. Yesterday, Friday the 13th, Rowling tweeted about the secret she had told them — the title of Strike9:Nick Jeffery found the most likely source of the title Sleep Tight, Evangeline, assuming it is not an anagram, in six minutes:BadlyWiredLamp who was at the Rowling meeting congratulated Nick on twixter seven minutes later: “Well done for

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